


Ignoring Armageddon

by foxiz



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-30
Updated: 2011-11-30
Packaged: 2017-10-26 17:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxiz/pseuds/foxiz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Coming Of Age Story Taking Place In A Slightly Altered Universe From The Standard Wherein Everyone Involved Is Rather Human; Also Wherein Rose Lalonde Discovers What She Believes To Be The Means To Locate The Purpose Of Her Existence; Finally Some Form Of Conflict Surfaces And Is Resolved In Order For The Story To Reach A Satisfying Conclusion,<br/>OR, A treatise on Lalondean metaphysics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignoring Armageddon

Rose Lalonde can’t remember the last time she saw a family photo. She cannot remember the last time her mother sat her down for a home-cooked meal, and she is fairly certain she has never in her life been tucked in to bed. It has only occurred to her very recently that this is unusual, that something is perhaps a little _different_ about the Lalonde household. Mom hardly speaks to Rose _at all_ , much less about her childhood, and there are no picture albums in the entirety of the Rainbow Falls estate (although her mother’s shelves contain many a gap that has always seemed to somehow be awaiting the presence of a scrapbook or perhaps an elementary school’s annual). This is but one of the many hints that tipped Rose off to her family’s peculiar state: most are eager to talk about their childhood, to share stories of sadness and memories of mischief. They will gladly laugh with one another about the time so-and-so broke his arm falling from a tree, and will openly lament the loss of friends who were forced to move away.

On the other hand, there were no siblings around to tease Rose about embarrassing moments, no father to recall whimsically-failed fishing trips. There were no too-nice uncles, no hovering grandmothers feeling all too fiercely the acute pain of an empty nest, not even a neighborhood of children to share times with. Her only relatives live halfway across the nation, and they don’t have any clue about her childhood. Hardly any recollections remain, other than the image of her mother, silhouetted against the light pouring in one of the five thousand glass panes lining the walls of their house, wielding a martini glass like a rapier and thoughtful silence like a shroud.

The vast library of psychology-related knowledge in her head meant that Rose’s first instinct was to presume she had some sort of traumatic incident; scarring encounters with her mysteriously-vanished father or oddly-absent relatives, perhaps. Many nights, she had lain awake in her thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton bedsheets and formulated possibilities: a violent car crash that killed her nonexistent father, but merely injured herself and her mother; less-than-pleasant divorce proceedings of which Mom never speaks; the list goes on, although she had always been hard-pressed to extend these hypotheses to the matter of the rest of her missing family. Rose found the entire affair so strange that, by the time she turned thirteen or so, she had forced herself to all but forget about it. Eventually, she simply convinced herself there was no point in worrying about something from so long ago, especially since it apparently hadn’t affected her growth. After all, perhaps her childhood was just _that_ boring.

 

Sometimes, though, Rose’s thoughts would stray back to the Riddle of the Removed Relatives, and she found it stranger still that there were a few recollections preserved in the recesses of her mind. Whether she has memory of these incidents due to a rare maternal storytelling session, genuine cognizance, or something else altogether she has never been quite sure, but the images are there regardless.

When she was just barely escaping the grasp of toddlerhood -- back when she was still interested in playing outside, so very long ago -- she fell and scraped her knee. The impact hardly broke skin; little to no blood was shed, and if you asked her today she would claim she only cried because of societal pressure to do so. Regardless, her mother considered this a situation of dire importance. With speed and resolve and condescending care that only a mother could manage, Rose was buckled in to her car seat, and Mom managed to put down her liquor long enough to drive her offspring to the pediatrician.

Rose remembered being placed atop a tissuepaper-covered examination bench. The lights were too bright, the air smelled sickly-sterile, there was a pile of _Highlights_ magazines mocking her from a table across the room, and, above all, Rose felt _very seriously annoyed_. Her mother, on the other hand, had her lips pulled into a thin smile. In her free hand, she held a manila file-folder containing what must have been a doctors’ report, and she proceeded to read from it:

"’At the fragile age of roughly three-and-one-quarter years old, Rose has, like most children do, suffered a particularly painful scrape of the knee. Claims to have just been playing outside, when she fell and sustained the ‘injury’. Very little blood was lost, if any. Have prescribed several boxes of adhesive bandages for treatment of this situation as well as preventative measures for further recurrences.’

You have no idea how relieved I am, Rose."

Before they made the hour-long trip home, Mom stopped at a high-end store and allowed Rose to pick out some bandages for her injury. Of course, “little Rosebud” chose the bandages with wizard-hats and starry designs; if you asked Mom today, she would claim there was no parental guidance involved in this decision. Rose maintains that this is a lie and that the magical motif of those bandages were simply yet another example of maternal influence in her personality. After all, what daughter wishes to have _shared interests and hobbies_ with her mother? Clearly, Mom had been manipulating her from the start.

The very next day, when Mom returned from work (where-ever that is; Rose has never been entirely certain) she brought with her a get-well gift: a small bundle of midnight, which she promptly deposited on her child’s bed and stood back to lean against the doorframe of the brightly-lit room.

This is how Mom would bandage Rose’s wounds; as if her maternal instinct was less _instinct_ and more _a collection of information gleaned from books titled One Thousand and One Ways to be a Caring Mother_. Rather than actually spending time with the girl, Mom would leave her carefully-prepared lunches in expensive imported lunchboxes and buy her extravagant presents every other week, always something bright pink and abhorrently girlish. Nearly every interaction they had was cookie-cutter in this fashion, executed in a sterile and surgical manner.

At three-and-so years of age, though, the girl was not yet cognizant of her mother’s by-the-book methods of child-rearing; she was not yet deeply entrenched in the notion that every move her mother made was part of a conspiracy to grate on her nerves. With genuine gratitude and childlike wonder, Rose held out one hand to the mysterious object, and with a tiny little mewl, it unfurled itself into the shape of a perfectly black kitten. Were it not for the glimmer in his eyes and the red bow-tie collar around his neck, he would have looked more like a cat-shaped void in space than an actual being of matter and mass. This is the last time Rose can ever remember smiling in the presence of her harpy of a mother.

“Jaspers,” Mother-dearest stated, and then promptly vanished down the hall, leaving her thin smile to linger in the air like some sort of spiteful Cheshire Stepford wife.

 

Rose remembers nothing else of that day, or even of the majority of that entire year of her life; indeed, the next year and most of the one afterwards are lost to a murky darkness as well -- but there’s one thing, one last faint little string of vivid recollections that lingers in her subconscious and forces her to consider the tiny possibility that she might actually be _completely, irrevocably insane_.

She and Jaspers were instant friends; cats are mellow and independent enough to not mind being used as a lap-warmer or a simple companion during those long sessions of reading one’s growing literature collection. Jaspers was with Rose throughout all of _The Canterbury Tales_ , all of Lovecraft, and even, in desperate times, throughout all of her third re-read of Webster’s magnum opus. Inevitably, as she grew, mere novels could not sate her hunger; she moved on to her mother’s library of psychology textbooks, and from there, only a few steps remained until young Rose took to practicing her therapist skills on Jaspers.

At first he would sit and listen intently, staring up at Rose with eyes black like ink, but his nature could not be denied for long. Jaspers was, despite his best efforts, just a cat, after all. Mostly he would lay around the house, occasionally moving to follow the afternoon sunlight through the living room like a furry sundial. (This, in and of itself, was the subject of many of their therapy sessions. To this day, Rose insists that the cat has deep subconscious ties to his feral heritage and longs for the plains of Africa, pyramids of Egypt, or, at the very least, the companionship of a Salem witch.)

 _Doctor_ Rose Lalonde would follow his path, constantly analyzing his behavior; sometimes she would reward a breakthrough with a few demure scritches to his chin, or, on rare occasions -- only for the really big discoveries -- she would feed him one of the fish-shaped snacks from the jar on their pristine kitchen counter. Really, when taking into account how much work the cat had to do to get treats and affection, he was making out like a bandit.

During the afternoon of Rose’s six-and-one-halfth birthday, Jaspers finally repaid the girl for her kindness.

 

As with every other day, Rose woke up, slipped out of her ridiculously gaudy moons-printed-on-lavender pajamas and into something more casual, and made her way to the dining room. She strode, without blinking, directly past the perfectly-toasted waffles (with precisely the suggested serving size of syrup on top) and the slice of red velvet cake with icing so pink it could confer diabetes at a glance. She stood on her tip-toes and grabbed a box of Count Chocula off the shelves, poured herself a bowl, and took a seat at the table. Halfway through the bowl, she noticed that the cake’s china saucer had a note stuck underneath it.

 

> Rosalyn,
> 
> I am sure that by now your ever-observing eyes have taken note of today’s date. Indeed, I would not be surprised if you had been waiting with bated breath for this day for the past week. I am so very proud of you, dear! I only regret that I have to go in to work today. You know how _hectic_ things get without me, after all.
> 
> As congratulations, you will find that in the living room, there are several presents...

 

Rose had to drag her eyes over the rest of the note, a full and thorough list of books and trinkets that would be lost in the recesses of her closet within a week. What use does a Lalonde have for _The Babysitters Club_ , anyway, and why would Rose care about the grooming techniques of small brightly-colored pony toys? She was well aware of the fact that she would end up never taking half of these presents out of the flower-themed wrapping paper. Some might call it _ungrateful_ , but for Rose it was just another tactic in the game she was learning to play with her mother.

(She would later send the majority of these presents to her irony-loving cousin, explaining to her mother that the gifts were “far too valuable” and she was merely “exercising the spirit of the Christmas season by passing along material wealth to the needy”. Mom would then respond by rewarding Rose with the _deluxe collectors’ edition box-sets_ of all the books she had given away, along with several bonus gifts to express her pride in the girl’s generous spirit.)

For every birthday, half-birthday, Christmas, New Year, semester-end, and sometimes even bank holiday that came, Mom always left her daughter some obnoxious amount of gifts in the den of their palatial estate. The novelty had worn off after the third Memorial Day when Rose discovered she had run out of room to store _yet another_ three-feet-tall teddy bear.

(That one went to her cousin, too.)

In any case, it was the usual procedure for Rose. She finished her breakfast off with a glass of “the finest pulp-free orange juice -- not from concentrate! -- that money can buy”, and welcomed the company of Jaspers when he joined her on the sofa. Whether or not he was there for her companionship or simply because it was the seat closest to the windows, she did not care. When lunch was finished, Jaspers relocated to a different spot, following the sun in his usual arc across the main room; and, also like usual, Rose brought with her a little clipboard and (terribly pink) pencil.

She remembers asking Jaspers the usual questions, remembers pretending his tail-flicks and stretches were legitimate responses. She remembers coming to the usual conclusions, with the usual citations and the usual psychological methods of getting there.

She also remembers, with perfect clarity, when the cat stood, jumped on to the arm of the sofa, nuzzled against her, and meowed into her ear all of the universe’s darkest secrets.

**Author's Note:**

> As this is something I'm working on in my spare time, updates may be quite sparse and unpredictable.  
> Also, tags will change/disappear/be amended as chapters come out; mostly as spoiler avoidance, but also because there's no way to predict when or where I may add another character or three.


End file.
